Monthly Archives: May 2014

The Koch Machine

Posted on by
2

We’re about to learn a lot more about the Koch (pronounced “Coke”) brothers, despite their best efforts to hide behind the myriad front organizations they use to funnel cash to politicians who’ll do their bidding. “Citizen Koch,” a documentary about their power play in Wisconsin to eliminate bargaining rights of public employees and undermine labor protections generally, begins a limited run in theaters next month after being pushed off the PBS calendar by the Koch brothers, among the biggest contributors to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Image

Another movie, Robert Greenwald’s 2013 “Koch Brothers Exposed,” has been updated with a 2014 edition to show how the industrialists have been further empowered by Supreme Court rulings allowing corporations and individuals to spend unlimited sums in election campaigns. The Kochs have attacked Greenwald’s film relentlessly, right up to the preview this week by House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi on Capitol Hill. You can view it here.

Greenwald reveals how the family’s $100 billion fortune has been amassed through oil and gas pipelines – beginning with father Fred’s business laying pipelines for Josef Stalin in the 1930s – and investments in industries like paper and plastics. Koch Industries is one of the nation’s top 15 polluters, accounting for more than 300 oil spills. It was found guilty by a federal jury of stealing oil from Native American lands. The company has paid more than $100 million in fines.

After spending $122 million trying to defeat President Obama and other Democrats in 2012, the billionaire oilmen are reportedly spending $125 million during this off-year election, flooding different regions with market-tested ads, trying to lay the ground for more gridlock and their own guy in 2016. The unrestrained power of “Citizen Koch” is scary, frankly. If the Kochs go unchecked we are facing the threat of corporate oligarchy. It may already exist in practice.

Image

That’s why I’m watching both these Koch films (Citizen Koch plays downtown D.C. on June 20) and passing along as much information about them as I can. Here‘s the nationwide schedule for the Citizen Koch showing. Check out the links in this blog, and tell me what you know. Nicholas Confessore of The New York Times recently penned a revealing portrait of the Kochs’ political odyssey over the past few decades. Back in 1980, when David Koch was running for vice president on the Libertarian Party ticket, which favored “the repeal of the fraudulent, virtually bankrupt, and increasingly oppressive Social Security system.” his brother Charles objected to a $2.5 million political expense. Today they spend that much in a week.

Besides more than a hundred million Koch dollars that go to front groups like the ubiquitous Americans for Prosperity, which in turn fronts for numerous Tea Party chapters, hundreds of millions more are leveraged from other right-wing individuals and groups. The Kochs, in effect, are the bagmen for a vast right-wing conspiracy that Greenwald estimates spent $400 million in 2012 alone. This is not including the right-wing think tank echo chamber headed by the Kochs’ own The Cato Institute.

While the media has focused largely on the Kochs’ massive national political machine, the brothers have been even more diabolical at the state level, where they fund the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) to draft model legislation and talking points for state legislators, and canned editorials promoting the legislation that local newspapers snap up to fill column inches.

The result is a rash of bad, even dangerous, legislation – including the “stand your ground” laws that George Zimmerman used as a shield to shoot and kill an unarmed Trayvon Martin. Especially troubling to me is the Kochs’ assault on unions, not only collective bargaining but also pension security. Most recently, the Koch brothers’ Americans for Prosperity mounted a targeted strategic campaign to scuttle a Michigan state relief plan for the City of Detroit that would move the city toward solvency while minimizing pension cuts and saving the art library.

MSNBC’s Chris Hayes asks the right question here: “Who do you want to see suffer?”

http://www.msnbc.com/all-in/watch/right-wing-group-against-detroit-deal-264606787582

As the New York Times’ David Firestone opined in the paper’s editorial blog:

“Under the circumstances, the proposed state contribution on behalf of vulnerable pensioners is a modest way to make up for Lansing’s decades of abandonment. But it’s too much for the Kochs to stomach. They apparently want city workers and retirees to publicly suffer for the sin of having been union members. They want bondholders and insurance companies at the front of the creditors’ line, and don’t seem to care if the Detroit Institute of Arts has to sell off its paintings and sculptures to put them there.

“As they have in so many other areas of public life, two of the country’s wealthiest citizens are using their good fortune to make life far more difficult for those at the bottom of the ladder.”

The Kochs’ pension shakedown is in keeping with the brothers’ longtime effort to change Social Security insurance into a more Wall Street-friendly investment fund, spending millions to scare Americans into believing Social Security is in peril, when it’s not. They want all pension money invested in the stock market, where the risk is high for individual investors and the reward high for the institutions. The Kochs want a piece of that giant pension pie.

We can’t let the Koch Machine run our country. Arm yourself with information. Spread the word.

Labor Memorial Day

Posted on by
1

Growing up, May Day always conjured up Maypole dances and the smell of beautiful flowers at church festivals celebrating Mary, a reputed virgin mother. I learned that it was the day to celebrate St. Joseph the worker, the patron saint of workers, which I know today only partially acknowledges the importance of the holiday.

May 1 has been observed around the world as International Workers Day since 1889, in memory of the protesters killed at Haymarket Square, Chicago, campaigning for the eight-hour workday. The labor activists had set May 1, 1886 as the day for a nationwide strike for better working conditions, but the peaceful May 4 Chicago rally quickly became a confrontation with police and agitators.

The “Haymarket Massacre” became a rallying cry for the union movement in the United States and around the world. Through the struggle of those unionists and others who have followed in their footsteps, we have won not only the 8-hour day and the 40-hour workweek, but also overtime pay, fair labor standards and protections, job safety regulations, and laws that allow us to bargain with employers over pay and conditions of work, including pensions and health care.

So, May Day is something to celebrate. It doesn’t require a march with the trappings of war, as the despots in Moscow, Beijing and Pyongyang have staged, or even with bullhorns and protest signs at the local Wal-Mart – although that would be appropriate. But it does require an understanding that nothing will be won in our society without a unified struggle against the corporate powers that control industry and, to a great degree, government.

Image

Mother Jones, right, helps a little girl with her shoe at the tent encampment of miners in Ludlow, Colo., in 1886.

It’s also a good time to remember those who have paid the ultimate price in the pursuit of economic justice – not only at Haymarket Square but also in other seminal labor fights. This is a time when the United Mine Workers honor the memory of the 66 men, women and children who were killed in April 1914 in an attack on striking miners’ camp at Ludlow, Colo., and in the protests that followed – one of the deadliest labor confrontations in our history.

The attack on the miners, orchestrated by oil baron John D. Rockefeller Jr. and a detective agency he hired, with the assistance of the governor of Colorado and the National Guard, is one of the saddest chapters in the long-running war on organized workers in this country. While the violence may have dissipated over time, corporations still take no prisoners in their systematic assault on worker rights.

May 1 also is the day famed schoolteacher, dressmaker and union organizer Mary Harris “Mother” Jones claims as her birthday, although the record is not clear on her birth. But she made sure the record was clear about Ludlow, where she went to help the families during the strike. Here’s her first-hand account from her 1925 autobiography:

“All day long the firing continued. Men fell dead, their faces to the ground. Women dropped. The little Snyder boy was shot through the head, trying to save his kitten. A child carrying water to his dying mother was killed. By five o’clock in the afternoon, the miners had no more food, nor water, nor ammunition. They had to retreat with their wives and little ones into the hills. Louis Tikas was riddled with shots while he tried to lead women and children to safety. They perished with him.

“Night came. A raw wind blew down the canyons where men, women and children shivered and wept. Then a blaze lighted the sky. The soldiers, drunk with blood and with the liquor they had looted from the saloon, set fire to the tents of Ludlow with oil-soaked torches. The tents, all the poor furnishings, the clothes and bedding of the miners’ families burned. Coils of barbed wire were stuffed into the well, the miners’ only water supply.

“After it was over, the wretched people crept back to bury their dead. In a dugout under a burned tent, the charred bodies of eleven little children and two women were found – unrecognizable. Everything lay in ruins. The wires of bedsprings writhed on the ground as if they, too, had tried to flee the horror. Oil and fire and guns had robbed men and women and children of their homes and slaughtered tiny babies and defenseless women. Done by order of Lieutenant Linderfelt, a savage, brutal executor of the will of the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company.

“The strikers issued a general call to arms: Every able bodied man must shoulder a gun to protect himself and his family from assassins, from arson and plunder. From jungle days to our own so-named civilization, this is a man’s inherent right. To a man they armed, throughout the whole strike district. Ludlow went on burning in their hearts.”

Ludlow burned into the conscience of a nation, helping to improve the lot of workers everywhere, as Colorado historians explain in a Rocky Mountain PBS documentary:

The UMWA’s two-day centennial anniversary event at Ludlow May 17-18 includes family activities including a simulated coalmine, a craft area for kids and performances by local musicians. Noted authors and academics join political and labor leaders in addressing the crowd.

Arlo Guthrie is not scheduled to play, but if he were he would certainly sing his tribute to the brave miners and their families:

For more information about why Ludlow matters, check out this article in The New Yorker.